Beharrlich's log of language wandering

[Beharrlich]

Hi all!

So, I had one of these long, long ago on HTLAL, but wasn't very good at maintaining it. I'd like to give it another go here. Off we go!

I've been learning languages off and on for a bit over 15 years now. Originally it started with a brief brush against Gaelic when I was a teenager, which I quickly gave up on (although I still have the Teach Yourself book). Then I dabbled with Latin, which I also abandoned (although it's still on my list of targets). I finally hit upon German, which I've stuck with ever since. Along the way, I decided to start working on French as well as Russian. And, despite not being able to manufacture any more hours in the day, I still struggle to keep myself from checking out other languages. I should learn Spanish, and Italian catches my eye, and Dutch is practically a freebie with my English and German knowledge, and Swedish, hey, that sounds pretty neat, and...

You get my point. The wanderlust is real.

This will be my log of (hopefully) daily language activities. We'll see how it goes!

[tomgosse]

Welcome to the forum. Look forward to following your progress.

All the best,
Tom

[Basil]

welcome josh!

The wanderlust is real.

oh, i know that feeling.

[Beharrlich]

Welcome to the forum. Look forward to following your progress.

All the best,
Tom

Merci!

[Beharrlich]

welcome josh!

The wanderlust is real.

oh, i know that feeling.

Thanks! And yeah, I think most of us here suffer from it...

[Beharrlich]

So, not quite daily so far, but:

Not a bad weekend at all, language-wise. I did some heavy reading of Harry Potter in German at LingQ* on Friday and a bit on Saturday. My only problem with this is, I'm not sure how much I should go over already read text, to work on learning the words; and how much I should forge ahead and read new material. There's a whole lot of words that I marked up on my first read through of early chapters, and I don't know them all yet, so going ahead and continuing to mark up hundreds of words seems sort of like busy work. I know Kaufman's stance ("just keep reading, review very little!"), but I don't fully agree with that. So it's a matter of finding balance. Something to think about.

Saturday evening and this morning, I read the first chapter (and first actual reading extract) of Viking Language 1. The audio I have for it is in Modern Icelandic pronunciation, which is fine with me; two birds, one stone, and all that. My initial impression of Old Norse (or Old Icelandic) is: Germanic Latin on steroids. The declensions, oh my! On the to-do list: Iversen listing the words for the first reading section.

I listened to some Russian this afternoon - just reviewing Assimil lessons. I need to do some serious vocabulary work with the course, extracting the words and learning them either through Iversen lists or with some other means. While Russian grammar is tricky, it's the absolutely foreign words in Russian that really give me trouble - they just don't stick to my memory like other foreign language words.

As mentioned elsewhere on the forum, I ordered Schwedisch ohne Mühe this weekend. Not that I needed another course (especially in a brand-new-to-me language), but hey, it caught my eye. Good thing I'm not learning languages for a job and I'm free to explore to my heart's content.

* I feel torn about LingQ. I love the idea of it, but the price is just outrageous, in my opinion. I currently have a subscription due to being able to get a year for a bargain (it was some coupon deal), but once that runs out, I don't know if I can swallow $10/month. I know about Learning With Texts, and actually have it installed on my webserver, but it's just.... clunky. I really appreciate that the creator made it, but I have to give it to the LingQ folks, their user interface is really slick and snappy at this point. Using LWT always feels like I'm fighting against the program that I'm trying to use - clicking things seems slow, the various iframes are slow to load, etc. So, anyway - not really sure what I will do when my LingQ subscription runs out. $10/month is a foreign language book or other resource every month!

[Elenia]

So, not quite daily so far, but:

Not a bad weekend at all, language-wise. I did some heavy reading of Harry Potter in German at LingQ* on Friday and a bit on Saturday. My only problem with this is, I'm not sure how much I should go over already read text, to work on learning the words; and how much I should forge ahead and read new material. There's a whole lot of words that I marked up on my first read through of early chapters, and I don't know them all yet, so going ahead and continuing to mark up hundreds of words seems sort of like busy work. I know Kaufman's stance ("just keep reading, review very little!"), but I don't fully agree with that. So it's a matter of finding balance. Something to think about.

Saturday evening and this morning, I read the first chapter (and first actual reading extract) of Viking Language 1. The audio I have for it is in Modern Icelandic pronunciation, which is fine with me; two birds, one stone, and all that. My initial impression of Old Norse (or Old Icelandic) is: Germanic Latin on steroids. The declensions, oh my! On the to-do list: Iversen listing the words for the first reading section.

I listened to some Russian this afternoon - just reviewing Assimil lessons. I need to do some serious vocabulary work with the course, extracting the words and learning them either through Iversen lists or with some other means. While Russian grammar is tricky, it's the absolutely foreign words in Russian that really give me trouble - they just don't stick to my memory like other foreign language words.

As mentioned elsewhere on the forum, I ordered Schwedisch ohne Mühe this weekend. Not that I needed another course (especially in a brand-new-to-me language), but hey, it caught my eye. Good thing I'm not learning languages for a job and I'm free to explore to my heart's content.

* I feel torn about LingQ. I love the idea of it, but the price is just outrageous, in my opinion. I currently have a subscription due to being able to get a year for a bargain (it was some coupon deal), but once that runs out, I don't know if I can swallow $10/month. I know about Learning With Texts, and actually have it installed on my webserver, but it's just.... clunky. I really appreciate that the creator made it, but I have to give it to the LingQ folks, their user interface is really slick and snappy at this point. Using LWT always feels like I'm fighting against the program that I'm trying to use - clicking things seems slow, the various iframes are slow to load, etc. So, anyway - not really sure what I will do when my LingQ subscription runs out. $10/month is a foreign language book or other resource every month!

What about readlang? It doesn't have the same functionality (split screen and grading words by difficulty, choosing your own translations...) but it is still nice to use and it works well.

[Beharrlich]

What about readlang? It doesn't have the same functionality (split screen and grading words by difficulty, choosing your own translations...) but it is still nice to use and it works well.

You know, I had honestly forgotten about Readlang! I tried it when it came out originally and didn't care for it; I don't recall why. I just gave it a try and it seems nice, although the dictionary doesn't seem to be great. I'll play around with it some more. Do you have a paid membership for it?

Honestly, the more I think about the monthly cost of LingQ and some of the questionable ethics of its creator (I recall him being banned repeatedly on HTLAL for his marketing nonsense), the more I just don't really want to use it. LWT does the same thing and is free, and Readlang looks decent and is *much* cheaper, assuming I even feel the need to get a subscription.

[Beharrlich]

I've been up to a few different things the past couple of days - probably too many different things, truth be told, but as noted at the beginning, this is all for fun, and I'm in no rush, so I'm going to enjoy dabbling. Anyway:

Russian

I did about a sheet and a half of words using Iversen's method. (I'm using a custom Excel sheet with blocks of 6 columns, so it's simple for me to figure out how many words based on number of sheets done.) Doing the math now, it was 48 new words. I did the initial run of those two days ago, then I did the first repetition round yesterday. My source was just the glossary in the back of the New Penguin Russian Course by Nicholas Brown.

My plan is to do some more words this evening.

I also read over lesson 93 in my Assimil Russian course, which I've been working with off and on for... a long, long time. The difficulty spike in the later lessons seem much more daunting than the later lessons in, say, French with Ease, so I end up putting it aside for ages, then picking it up again later.

Swedish

I checked out the first few introduction lessons for Swedish on Duolingo; nothing too laborious. Although, knowing basically nothing about Swedish, the article situation was (and is still) a bit confusing. However, now that I think about it, I suppose Old Norse does that as well (definite article attached to the end of words instead of being free-standing in front of it). I picked up a copy of Essential Swedish Grammar and will probably read through that soon.

I listened to lessons 1-4 of the Schwedish ohne Mühe course, just to start getting a feel for the pronuncation.

German

The usual for this one: writing to my tutor, getting corrections, and lots of reading. The reading has been on LingQ, but as mentioned above, I may start using a different service (Readlang or LWT). The new LingQ app for iOS is really nice, but I still think $10/month is an outrageous price. I also don't care much for their vocabulary review system, and there's not an easy way to export my marked words to another system.

I also did a bit of listening, mostly podcasts. I've been looking for something new to listen to, and haven't found anything that has grabbed me yet. Deutsche Welle stuff is great, but still - variety is the spice of life.

Spanish

Read over the first couple of lessons in my Assimil course before bed last night, because obviously, that's what language nerds do.

[Elenia]

What about readlang? It doesn't have the same functionality (split screen and grading words by difficulty, choosing your own translations...) but it is still nice to use and it works well.

You know, I had honestly forgotten about Readlang! I tried it when it came out originally and didn't care for it; I don't recall why. I just gave it a try and it seems nice, although the dictionary doesn't seem to be great. I'll play around with it some more. Do you have a paid membership for it?

Honestly, the more I think about the monthly cost of LingQ and some of the questionable ethics of its creator (I recall him being banned repeatedly on HTLAL for his marketing nonsense), the more I just don't really want to use it. LWT does the same thing and is free, and Readlang looks decent and is *much* cheaper, assuming I even feel the need to get a subscription.

I haven't got a paid membership for Readlang. To be honest, I don't use it very much - I tend to forget about it, and the texts I'm reading in it I'm more than happy to leave out sentence and phrase look-ups when I've reached my daily limit. I love the chrome extension, however, and make good use of that.